"Transparency", or the lack of it, is the key theme informing the disruption in credit markets over the last three months, Macquarie Group managing director Allan Moss told a media briefing on the company's half year profit yesterday.This newsletter asked Moss to elaborate on this theme, in the context of the inability of many investment and commercial banks to fully identify and price their holdings of sub-prime loans and related securities, and to specifically comment on operational risk around the banking industry."Transparency has been the key issue that has unsettled credit markets over the last few months," Moss said."I don't think that means that operational risks are, well, they are certainly a lot larger than what we thought they were anyway, I can say that to you (laughs)."Look it has always been the case right through history that it has been of fundamental importance that financial institutions carefully manage trading and credit exposures, so I don't think that's any surprise."I don't think it is a big surprise either that there would be some credit write-offs, some trading write-offs of this magnitude."While these have been very troubling in credit markets, in a historical context this is nothing new, in our view this is not nearly so severe as the sort of problems that beset the global banking industry in the early 1990s."In our view, major financial institutions are not, if I could [explain] it this way, the survival of major financial institutions is not threatened by what's going on, in our view."We haven't in our view got a 1990s situation where the survival of some major financial institutions was indeed in threat."What we have got is there are some losses, and none of us quite know what they are going to add up to right around the world, but losses of a few hundred billion. Now in the context of the world financial system, that's not that big."But it's sufficiently substantial that it's unsettling for investors when investors don't quite know where they are, and that's the situation we have today."